Travel is all about connections, changing trains to other places, the like-minded people we meet on the way or sometimes they are small mental leaps afforded by the act of travel, that period of time were there is nothing to do but think. Today I travelled from Oxford to Bristol for the last section of this trip and spent some of the journey listening to Jim Moray’s version of the folk song ‘ The Suffolk Miracle’. The theme of the song occurs in many folk songs and relates to the to the ghost of a deceased lover visiting their loved one in the depths of the night only to disappear at sunrise, the latter not yet knowing that their lover is dead.
As a device the idea of night visiting occurs with some frequency in gothic novels such as Anne Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), the heroine Adeline is visited in a series of dreams by a man she later discovers is her deceased father. Charles Dicken’s ghostly tale No 1 Branch Line: The Signalman, similarly has a visiting apparition who is a portent of the signalmans demise.
At the height of the Victorian passion for the gothic and supernatural there was a renaissance for folk music. Afraid that folk songs would be lost Tom Taylor (Folk songs of Brittany), Francis J Child (The English and Scottish Popular Ballads) and later Ralph Vaughan Williams, translated (in Taylors case), collected and published the lyrics and musical notation to many songs. The theme of night visiting in many of the songs would have accorded with the Victorian tastes in literature and lends itself to the high Victorian sense of gothic brooding romanticism.
The night visiting link to my area of research, however tenuous has a particular aesthetic sensibility that lends itself well to accessing the Victorian mindset through popular culture. In a bid to make my travels more rounded – a creative as well as a learning experience, influenced by both Victorian literature, architecture and traditional folk song I have attempted to create my own night visiting song/poem.
Nightvisiting
She laid a kiss
my pretty wife
upon my lips
neath the pale moonlight
she kissed and smiled
and told to me
how true her love
would always be
She Smiled and laughed
placed hand on hand
And face to face
we span and danced
the clock chimed one,
then two then three
fearing joy was not to last
on and on went our dance
My love let us sleep
let us here lay
the night is warm
and it shall soon be day
in a gown of white
flowers in hand
she laid us down upon the land
The church bells rang
I awoke alone
and traced her name upon the stone
fresh cut the letters
sharp and deep
under them, ‘neath cold clay
my pretty wife
doth sleep
The Child Ballads (public domain) http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/
Information regarding the talented Mr Moray can be founds at http://www.jimmoray.co.uk